Can you feel it in the air? EuroTab–2008 is coming to Warsaw, Poland, June 24–26. As the name implies, the event will center on the European tobacco market - the show will emphasize the burgeoning (and lucrative) markets of eastern Europe, but will incorporate participants, products, and visitors from Asia, the Balkans, Russia and the CIS, Africa, the Middle East, among others.

EuroTab aims to be a guiding light through the sometimes complicated and constantly morphing nature of tobacco retail. Systems of distribution vary dramatically from region to region, and even nation to nation, but slowly and surely, tobacco is becoming a globalized game, and tobacco product retail, an international sport.

Trust us. We have heard the rumblings throughout the industry about the glut of tobacco shows. We’ve levied some of these very complaints ourselves. There seems to be a show branded as the “must attend event of the year,” just about every other month or so. But, they all kind of end up being the same. The same companies catering to the same visitors, and too often at neighboring locales. EuroTab is different.

EuroTab is the only tobacco product show (no dissertations on the newest cigarette filter technology breakthrough) that invites manufacturers to show their wares into the mature and largely untapped eastern European market. Just check out the litany of growing woes for the Western tobacco market, and you’ll see East is where anyone concerned about the future of their business needs to look. Warsaw is the center of a bustling modern Polish economy finding its way from under the slumbering effect of the steel curtain - it is the perfect doorway for anyone looking to the eastern horizon.

EuroTab, being presented by Tobacco Products International (TPI) - giving the show the benefit of our international rolodex. There are lots of smokers throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Are you in those markets? Have all the contacts you could desire? Would you even know where to start? If the answer is “no” to any of those questions, maybe you should start looking to what your schedule is in late June.